The inflation part is troublesome, since according to official data, the current $335 price of the basic food basket (50 products that officials say is enough to feed a family of four for a month) has increased by 25% in the last four years. The basic food basket has outpaced the country’s inflation rate. Minimum salary is $475 to $625 a month.

has to pool her income with other family members to feed the five adults and three grandchildren who live in her zinc-roofed home

If you lived with four other adults, wouldn’t you expect them to pool in?

But I digress.

While campaigning Varela used to point out the price of lentils,

“You can’t be allowed to mark up basic-need items 60, 70 or 80 percent,” Varela said in a meeting with foreign journalists two weeks before the vote.

Of course, this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the fact that outgoing President Ricardo Martinelli is the billionaire owner of the country’s biggest supermarket chain, Super 99, and Varela may be wanting to stick Martinelli one where it hurts, so to speak:

In 2009, Varela was elected vice president on Martinelli’s ticket but they split acrimoniously two years later over Martinelli’s effort to engineer a constitutional change that would have allowed him to seek re-election.

Every time price controls are installed, shortages follow, which will avail Varela with the opportunity to blame the shortages on Martinelli.

Last month, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said his country was “committed to further strengthening and modernising the army” with the help of any country willing to provide aid.

He did not give details of an agreement between Nicaragua and Russia.

But Russia’s ambassador in Managua had confirmed in March that Moscow is interested in building a military resupply base in Nicaragua.

Russian defense chief Sergei Shoigu has said that Russia is weighing increasing its military presence in countries including Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela – particularly bases to refuel Russian warplanes far from home.

Panama’s economy has grown by an average of more than 8% in recent years and is expected to expand by 7% this year, by far the best performance in the Americas. Since 2002, poverty has been slashed from more than 40% to a quarter of the population.

“One good thing is that that there are no big ideological differences,” Nicolás Ardito-Barletta, a former World Bank economist who served less than a year as president in the mid-1980s, said before the vote. “Nobody’s going to kill the goose.”

Which brings us, finally, to the million-dollar question: In post-Chávez Venezuela, who has the political capital to institute the deep and painful reforms the country requires to break out of this wicked cycle? If Chávez himself — who was the closest to God you can get in Venezuelan politics — didn’t dare to touch the gasoline subsidy or move against the Armed Forces’ involvement in organized crime, who would dare? In the answer to that question, more than in the epic battles painted by the likes of María Corina Machado, lies the key to Venezuela’s long term future.